Edit: After reading the comments on Jason's post regarding using disasters as a teaching prompt I would just like to say how deeply sorry I am for any offense this post has caused. My enthusiasm was related to the techniques and approach not the terrible events in Japan. What happened and is happening in Japan is clearly a tragedy. If the learners had indicated uneasiness or an unwillingness to continue I would have taken the lesson in a different direction. Instead it seemed to me they wanted to express their thoughts and feelings. Whilst I do believe the classroom is an appropriate place to address world events... even tragic ones... I will try to be much more sensitive in the future when talking about it in such a public space :-(
After my first Scene it! lesson failed I wanted to try again with that class. They've been asking for another Live Reading session ever since Valentine's Day. (That never happens!) So I decided today to do a session following the recent disaster in Japan. We started with an image of the Tsunami... using Jason Renshaw's great Scene It! templates.
Download SceneIt Japan Earthquake
This was followed by some vocab brainstorming and a discussion. They were all quite deeply concerned and distressed by the recent events and wanted to talk about it.
We then created a Breaking News report using a Live Reading. Once again they thoroughly enjoyed this task. One learner said "this work makes us feel alive". Well I've never had a response like that in class before!
Here's what they produced.
They copied it down onto their SceneIt sheets and by the time they'd done a bit of WordWise work the time had gone. However, it gave me several ideas for some follow up project work and I remembered another amazing template that the English Raven has shared here.
So this afternoon I adapted it, typed in their own class created reading as the text (yay :-) ) and hey presto... another learner created piece of content that looks professional, is topical and only took a little extra time to produce.
Download Reading project Japan Earthquake
I'm proud of it and I know they will be too... and I'm hoping it will produce some more good work on Wednesday.
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